Walkers in the city and everywhere
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Walkers in the city and everywhere
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Re: Walkers in the city and everywhere
#2For anybody interested in being more present while walking, I recommend photography.
You will become more aware of your surroundings if you look for cool things to photograph. I recomand using an actual camera, the quality of it is irrelevant. Using your phone will be a distraction since you open it to take a photo, but see a notification from x and then you will at least think about how to respond, even if you don’t open it.
Re: Walkers in the city and everywhere
#3I was wondering if there was a term for this. It is something I noticed a few months ago, when my phone broke at the precise time I had a full blown day-long internet outage at home. I got in my car and started driving around, looking for phone repair places. Asked for some directions. Walked into a pawn shop I normally wouldn't have. All in all it was an enjoyable/novel experience (compared to normal, anyway - I am old enough to remember a time when it was always like this) but definitely turned what should have been a ~30 minute chore to a 3 hour one.
Re: Walkers in the city and everywhere
#4I've been fascinated with the idea of a dérive for a few years, but have also been timid in actually doing one with a friend or acquaintance for fear of being asked basic questions like, "If you just want to go on a walk, we can go on a walk."
To anyone whose dérive'd, how did it go?
Re: Walkers in the city and everywhere
#5I don't get it. A bunch of paragraphs on going for a walk?
Re: Walkers in the city and everywhere
#6For anybody interested in being more present while walking, I recommend photography. You will become more aware of your surroundings if you look for cool things to photograph. I recomand using an actual camera, the quality of it is irrelevant. Using your phone will be a distraction since you open it to take a photo, but see a notification from x and then you will at least think about how to respond, even if you don’t…
Related to this: I have been working towards not carrying a phone around at all. Being a hyperconnected and reachable as we tend to be nowadays does not feel healthy. I recently set up a JMP Chat account so I can proxy SMS and calls to my XMPP account.
Re: Walkers in the city and everywhere
#7flâneur: a great word.
when I see all these people walking around staring at their phones, I want to slap them with that word.
Whatever it is on your phone, it'll wait. Whatever's happening in front of you: that will not wait, and it'll never come again.
Re: Walkers in the city and everywhere
#8One of my past awesome significant others, I found due to something like some of the awareness talked about here.
She'd made a post on a dating site, asking, simply, what was your favorite part of the city, and why.
I responded with something about the different atmospheres of rather small areas, where the transitions are, etc.
I won, and our first date was to be a lunch break from her science lab work on a weekend. But after lunch we played hooky, and walked all around town and talked for many hours, ending up sitting on a harbor wharf.
Where one of the boats we saw was a ferry to the Cape Cod area, which I suggested as our second date. We just explored it without plans or arrangements.
(Much later, her heightened awareness grew to realizing that she could do better than me, :) but we did have some shared understanding and values about the world, and a lot of that was about perceiving, like when on walks.)
Re: Walkers in the city and everywhere
#9If you live in a city, and travel on foot or bicycle, you can do this every day as part of daily business. You need some downtime and exercise at some point, you're outside anyway, so take advantage of the opportunity.
Re: Walkers in the city and everywhere
#10I don't get it. A bunch of paragraphs on going for a walk?
The essay defines the concept of psychogeography then explores how people have historically engaged with that concept.
As a small example of what this essay is pointing to: suppose your neighborhood could be 100% walkable and that you could easily walk to work, the doctor, your friends' houses, etc. What is desirable about that kind of environment? What would it take to make it possible? What kinds of systemic forces counteract it?
> Many of the issues we face [...] are deeply connected to the physical world and our interactions with our immediate surroundings. [...] As we emerge into post-pandemic public spheres, we have the opportunity to imagine new versions of the public sphere[.]
> Guy Debord, a founding member of both bodies, defined psychogeography as an environment’s impact, whether mindful or not, on an individual’s behaviors or emotions.
> These sorts of actions, even on the smallest scale, carry significant meaning when practitioners assert how they wish to inhabit a space, and when they are able to convince others to likewise undertake this reflective process of questioning the status quo.